BMI Guy Moon Feature

When Guy Moon moved to California from his native Wisconsin just over 10 years ago, he had no idea he would be hob-nobbing with Hollywood movie and television types. As an award-winning pianist trained in classical, jazz and contemporary music, Moon intended to play with a band and work as a studio musician.

As a hired gun, he ended up doing studio work for soundtracks and, by chance, fell into pictures. It wasn't too long before he was scoring TV shows and his first film, a B-movie horror flick called "Creepozoids." Thankfully, it's all been uphill.

His big break came in what he refers to as his first real film, "Mystic Pizza" (also Julia Roberts first real film), when he added an additional five minutes to the original score.

Last year, Moon was called upon by his friend and music supervisor/producer Steve Tyrell to score the surprise hit "The Brady Bunch Movie." Musically, it was odd as it involved songs, a new score and the actual old score from the series.

In the hopes of reaching the Brady movie's success, Paramount Pictures is releasing "The Very Brady Sequel" and called upon the team of Tyrell & Moon to handle the music. The idea behind the soundtrack is similar: old, new and two songs from the '70s.

"Half the score is derived directly from the score from the TV show," Moon begins. "The other half is original music that I did that is a very wide variety of stuff--like Indiana Jones and horror music. A lot of the original stuff I did was kind of campy too. They go to Hawaii in this episode so there's this Hawaiian music. There's a real wide variety." Adventure and horror music? Afterall, this is the Brady Bunch! "I wasn't really scoring the picture, I was scoring what they were thinking," Moon explains, referring to Jan's "Psycho"-like dreams.

The Brady's are a bunch of ultra-'70s folks making their way in the '90s. "It's the only way you could bring back the Brady's without it being cornball. It's almost like the Brady's are making fun of themselves," Moon laughs.

To achieve the adventure and '90s sounds, Moon used a 50-piece orchestra for five or six cues. For the old score, Moon actually used a very-Brady-like orchestra, just a small 15-piece group.

Far from the '70s retro sounds, the composer is continuing his work on an on-going project (March 1997 completion date) for Hanna-Barbera, the animated series "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest." "This is the hardest thing I've done in my life. They want it big, Big, BIG," Moon explains. "I'll send them in a tape of say 12 minutes of music, and they're main comment is, 'Make it bigger.' They want a big orchestra with a good synth rig. But I have to do it all with a synth so there's a lot of samples. It's great because they push me so much I'll probably replace my whole demo reel with Jonny Quest music. It's hip and it's current."

Moon is no stranger to Hanna-Barbera music. He's leant his jazzy piano style to numerous series in the past, and even has another in the can, "Cow & Chicken"--Hanna-Barbera's answer to the hip animated shows like "Ren & Stimpy."

In a completely different vein, once again, Moon just finished scoring, orchestrating and producing music for the "The Portrait," a dark musical directed by Joel Kaplan based loosely on Dorian Gray. While the script itself is in the first stages, most of the music is complete. At this time, no performance date has been set.